Broadway in Paris? A Theater's Big Experiment

By CELESTINE BOHLEN

Published: April 20, 2011

PARIS -- Since his first season as director of the venerable Th?re du Ch?let in 2006, Jean-Luc Choplin has been seeking to marry the sophisticated with the popular, the daring with the safe.

It has meant bringing in a gospel choir from the South African township of Soweto to sing Mozart's ''Magic Flute''; a Russian video artist to stage the Mozart version of Handel's ''Messiah''; Pl?do Domingo
to star in the classic ''Cyrano de Bergerac''; and the British alternative band Gorillaz with its opera, ''Monkey: Journey to the West,'' sung in Chinese.

More striking, yet, it has meant introducing Broadway musicals to Paris. In France, where audiences have been thought to be allergic to the genre, this has been a breakthrough. Before ''My Fair Lady'' opened in December, Mr. Choplin
sent assistants out into the streets to interview Parisians.

''No one had heard of it,'' he said in a recent interview in his spare white office, which has a view onto the Seine directly below.

When the Ch?let staged ''A Little Night Music'' in February 2010, the theater said it was the first time a Stephen Sondheim musical had ever been performed in France. Mr. Choplin gave it a tantalizingly short run -- six performances
-- even though it starred French favorites like Lambert Wilson and Leslie Caron.

''It was like a laboratory experiment, '' he said, ''and it was hugely successful, an amazing success.''

Building on his track record, which has included ''The Sound of Music,'' ''Showboat,'' ''West Side Story'' and Leonard Bernstein's rarely performed ''Candide,'' Mr. Choplin
is about to open a full-scale production of ''Sweeney Todd,'' the Sondheim musical first staged on Broadway 32 years ago, and never in France. For this Sondheim show the run will be longer --
from Friday through May 21 -- and the challenge greater. For many French music lovers, Mr. Sondheim remains an unknown.

To educate them, the Ch?let recently brought in Alain Perroux, an expert in lyrical drama, to lecture on the musical antecedents of Mr. Sondheim's masterpiece, starting with its opening high-pitched whistle to its hidden references to Gregorian chants,
and including its Brechtian overtones.

''Sondheim takes pleasure in seizing certain clich? and pushing them,'' Mr. Perroux said. The result, he assured his audience, is a ''classic,'' worthy of world-class houses like Covent Garden, Vienna's State
Opera House and now, the Ch?let.

In 2004, when Mr. Choplin was being considered to head the premiere theater of the City of Paris (which provides the Ch?let with more than 60 percent of its budget), he was asked by Mayor Bertrand Delano?hat he wanted to do. His answer was that he wanted
to return the Ch?let, which first opened in 1862, to its original status as the kind of theater that welcomed Sergei Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes in 1909; where Gustav Mahler conducted his Second Symphony in
1910; and that took ''Showboat'' to Paris in 1929, two years after it opened on Broadway.

''This Ch?let had disappeared over the years,'' Mr. Choplin said. Instead, in the 1990s, the Ch?let was locked into a rivalry with the national Bastille Opera over operatic repertory, a competition described by The New York Times in
1992 as ''artistic, political and personal,'' pitting Jacques Chirac, the center-right mayor of Paris, against Jack Lang, the minister of culture in France's Socialist government.

Mr. Choplin's goal was to make the theater more modern, more original, more international, more diverse and yes, more popular -- ''a family place,'' as he put it, where Parisians can take the same ''grande-m?''
or ''grande-tante'' who might have taken them to the Ch?let as children.

This appeal to ''le grand public'' -- something of a pejorative term in the Paris music world -- is often traced to a stint Mr. Choplin had with Disney: he worked first at EuroDisney, as Disneyland Paris was once called, and then in
California, as an executive at the Walt Disney Company.

At Disney he was regarded as the high-culture counterweight to Snow White and Mickey Mouse: a European import who had worked with Rudolf Nureyev when they were directors of the Paris Opera Ballet and with the composer John Cage when he was head of the
music festival of La Ste.-Baume.

''What Disney taught me -- what it reinforced in me -- is the attention to the audience,'' he said. He is well aware that this approach is regarded askance by the Paris elite.

''At the beginning, I kept hearing people who are closed to new proposals, to new categories, '' he said. ''People are in their shoeboxes; they don't like change.''

He said it reminded him of the reactions to Nureyev's first productions at the Paris Opera Ballet. ''He couldn't get good reviews,'' Mr. Choplin said. ''Now they are the main dishes at the opera.''

By some measures, Mr. Choplin's gamble has succeeded. He has increased both the annual number of productions and the audiences. Tickets sold rose to almost 300,000 in the 2009-10 season, from about 180,000 a year before he arrived. He expressed pride
that more people are coming from Paris's eastern districts, where incomes are lower and the ethnic mix more diverse.

Still, the criticism has occasionally been scathing. A month ago the music critic for Le Monde walked out of the ''Messiah'' production after intermission, dismissing the staging as something akin to ''special effects of
an Ibiza nightclub,'' and the conducting as nothing more than ''banal.''

Mr. Choplin said it helped when, after each opening, he got a note of support from the mayor's office. ''That's very encouraging,'' he said, ''because in the end, I am working for the City of Paris.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.